Your idea for voice acting is interesting, but quickly looking at my notes, CoS would need atleast 10 unique voices (including 2 feminine voices). But ARX27 might be an interesting experiment for that idea, there's not too many real characters in there.

mindcrime managed at least 20, but there wasnt a single female in the movie. now i know a pair of finish chicks online who have a band and therefore access to proper recording equipment. perhaps i can get them to cover those female voices. its a longshot though. with all the image editing ive done for them i think they owe me a favor. i could probibly do 5 voices off the bat, others id have to work with. i know another irl who studies acting, she gave me some pointers for doing a scottish accent, maybe i can ask her for some more tips. voice acting really isnt a priority at the moment.

im getting ready to upload a few new models to the ftp. updates will include the following:

sepuelture fighter now has a cockpit (and an awesome one at that), and i did a texture merge so it now only uses one set of maps. also new gatling system ready.

chimera recompiled for new gatling system, also fixed some texture bugs.

hi poly shagrath! albeit a minor improvement. also made a new high res texture and set it up to use the new guns.

also fixed some minor model/texture bugs on the chimera and its ready for new guns.

also will include 2 new gatling models, ive finished one and the other needs texturing. after thats done i will make some new table entries and upload to the ftp. all should be up in the next couple of days.

my next project will be to put a cockpit in the vulture and fix any bugs it may have, and of course rig it for the new guns. the apis, maelstrom, and nemesis will need to be reconverted and i need to make one more gatling model for the maelstrom. i may also get the rumrunner revisions in before beta2 as well. id like to get it all done before my new girlfriend gets back from christmas vacation, but i doubt it. at least you get some new stuff to play with . post beta 2 il make a few more remakes, the 3rd vesion of the ragnarok (and shine/glow/env maps for all 3), finish that pirate base, and most importantly, get everything lod-ed. then a few effects, and table edits and wel have a campaign. eventually il post all my lod0s in 3ds and cob and ask people if they want to contribute

well ive been playing a few multigames now that fs2net is back. working on a hi poly vulture, and creating model dumps of old stuff. when the ftp comes back up i hope to put up the current nukemod, and a model / effects dump which has been sitting on my desktop for a week.

giving thought to making nukemod multiplayer ready. il probibly create a nukemulti folder, and using a mod.ini, il add new tables to override the singleplayer tables in the nukemod folder with more balenced ones. also a majority of the retail ships will be removed keeping maybey a support ship and a freighter or 2 for gameplay.

gatling fire rates will need to come down as well to reduce lag, probibly to about the same as a mekhu/maxim/morning star. main tradeoff being size/strenght for rage and rate. so big guns will fire slow and hit hard, smull guns fire fast and hit weak, but equil in terms of damage/second. ships will also be balenced aa little better. overall i want to raise the bar for weapon performance, fast kills for them all. ships will also be made faster with higher damp factors. i wish to boost the pace of multiplayer for faster gamplay.

this brings us to performace, part of this is reducing the texture footprint. most of this is to be done by not using retail or media vp gfx. save just enough for gameplay. also im gonna include lower res textures for anything over 1024^2 and do away with alpha channels. il use fewer effects as well. my goal is to make sure all ships and ibx files fin nicely into a 64 meg video card. this is of course an idea im toying around with. the low res textures will also be in the nukemulti folder, which i can include a batch file to move them too the nukemod folder should anyone have problems running the mod on a suckey system.

for missions, i think il do 1 dogfight 1 or 2 tvts, and 1 or 2 coop. for dogfight il have a dante match. players should have fun chasing eachothers through its tunnels. for tvt il do a pirate vs gtva mission, 2 rumrunners vs a ragnarok. perhps also have a mission involving piracy, where you have to jack another team's cargo, while defending your own. coop missions may include dante attack (bearbaiting 2), and maybe a gtva raid on a pirate depot.

ive been working on new weapon models lately. i added 2 missiles and made a hipoly version of a 3rd. i just finished the 4th and im getting ready to texture it. the hi-poly vulture and the midgard carrier are both in the works.

im modelling primarily in max theese days. the main reason im doing weapon models is to gain experience with max before using it to finish the ships. i like max cause i dont have to bother with pcs at all, i can just save to pof, with little or no tweaking afterwords. this is gonna save me alot of time in the long run.

been spending alot of time testing the scripting system. so far i made remote turrets, a mouse flight control system, many a guage for the pirate hud, working flight controls, and more. with the experimental nature of the scripting system, it will me some time before any of theese features become an integrated part of the mod.

some stuff i want to have is blindfire, a complete hud, gatling turrets that dont suck, heavily animated ships, maybe even a stand alone interface and many others.

i encourage anyone whos doing a mod to take a good look at the scripting system. it is very powerfull and rather easy to work with. it is of course a wip so any feedback on the system will hopefully hasten its finalization.

ive finally finalized the wings for the vulture, finally! unfortunately the animations wont be as elaborate as i intended. they will still be pretty alabrate. moveable yoke in the cockpit, maybe acouple other hard gauges (perhaps an orientation gimbal or a horizon indicator). tails (aka em thrust deflectors), missile pods, the gatling guns of course.

the main cut was the complicated folding wings, which were gonna be jointed in 3 places to make it small enough to fit into a rumrunner bay, i decided on a simpler solution, single joint the wings and make the rumrunner slightly bigger. the wings fold up 162 degrees for landing, making it a little taller but alot less wide. in adition 2 landing skids which are housed in the joint between the two wing segments. the extreme angle of the wings means that they have to open a minimal of 32 degrees to allow the deployment of the skids. the skids must rotate 20.2 degrees for landing. those will be childed to invisible cubes in the wing so that they my drop a little.

i hope i can set different animations for "docking" as well as "fighterbay landing" because the fighterbay landing requires different wing settings. the 2 landing skids in the wing adds another problem, how the fuck to i put in the nose skid . whay its set up the ship looks like it would flip over it it tried to land on those skids. seeing as the weight of my massive gatling guns is far enough forward to counter out the weight of the engines. i might fakely solve the problem having the skids rotate a few degrees on the x axis when they unfold so that the bird will land with a downward slant.

this ship is a lesson in engineering futility. the center of gravity is too high above the center of drag and the center of lift. atmo flight will be hell. i get around this feasability error in 2 ways. clever glowpointing of little lightning bolts eminating from the surface of the deflection fins will be an electromagnetic implementation of thrust vectoring. what better way to manage an unmanageable airframe than with thrust vectoring, look how good it works on the b2 it should also add some coolness to the ship. the secont way is that the wings will tilt up a little bit in low altitude flight, either automatically or manually.

all this story tweaking should be enought to get a certain finnish physics nut off my case when it comes how my ship would never fly if it was real

il probibly want hard gauges for landing gear, wing angle, and that orientation gimbal in the cockpit, then i can focus on the nosegar problem and finally uv map the wee bastard. anyway im goin to bed, il post pics tomorrow if i feel like it.

well i bet you were all expcting to see an htl vulture by now. well its still not even fully uv mapped. normal maps are the main reason. its a new ship and i want perfect normal maps on it. so since i need more expirience with normal maps, i looked through my old ships for something that not only needed more detail, but was also uv mapped in a normal mapping friendly way.

i gave the seker a face lift not to long ago, but it was just a small geometry improvement, the textures were low res and rather crappy, leftovers from my early days of cut and paste texturing. i started making a height map for it but i didnt like that route, so i added more geometric detail, and made a new 2048^2 texture. i had to re-uv map some areas but the main hull area just used the same uv space. this means i can apply the new maps to the old model for lods with few uv tweaks.

i finally finished the diffuse texture and so im posting pics (see offitial screenshots thread). i still have a whole score of other maps to make for this thing, including the normal map. so i got some work to do on it. once ive finished it and a new cockpit to go with it, il work on the vulture.